Work and being: a hermeneutical study

The problematic dilemma motivating my thesis is how the contemporary understanding of work fails to regard human production as anything more than a necessary activity. This manifests in various ways, most predominantly in terms of utilitarian conceptions about the purpose of work and how it uses nature as the raw material for human ends. After an analysis that identifies the philosophical foundations of the contemporary attitude in Enlightenment suppositions and Marx's philosophy of work, I develop an alternative conception of work that discloses its ontological, as opposed to instrumental, nature. Following the hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur, I show how this ontological constitution suggests that work is more appropriately defined as a thanking activity—i.e., giving thanks to being itself. This is because thanking is fundamentally related to the reflective, or thinking, capacity of human being that inevitably seeks to understand life in relation to an interpretation of the meaning of being. To interpret is, in this respect, a manner of giving thanks to being. Hence, I argue that work's thanking aspect is most evident in terms of how it metaphorically discloses an interpretation of the meaning of being through its artefacts and structures that are integrated into the whole of human doing and thinking. This extends to even the most literal aspects of necessity concerned with biological and economic sustenance. With respect to the historical conception of the relation between work and thinking, that is generally understood as the division between vita activa and vita contemplativa, my thesis shows how these two modes of being are united within a broader, ontological description of human activity since these modes require and mutually develop one another. A prime instance of this concerns the area of human vocation which I focus on in my concluding chapter. I contend that vocation is an actualisation of interpretive horizons of meaning. It is, in short, the praxical and poetical realisation of theoretical interpretation.